(gentle music) - Welcome to Stories from the Stage produced by World Channel and GBH Boston in partnership with Tell & Act I'm Liz Cheng.

- And I am Patricia Alvarado Núñez.

- And we help create Stories from the Stage.

Today's love stories are not the typical tale of meeting the love of your life, and walking hand in hand into the sunset.

- Liz, I think that these stories are less about the romantic notion of love and more about taking that leap and hoping for the best that things will somehow work out.

- It's so true we had hundreds of stories to choose from, and we chose two storytellers today who couldn't have been more different.

LADVA: My name is Nimisha Ladva.

I live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

- I pick Nimisha, she definitely made the relationship difficult or should I say others made it difficult for her.

- Yeah, it was a little like, guess who's coming to dinner?

with Nimisha traditional parents playing the role of spoilers.

I was born in Kenya, raised in England, educated in California, and I am a mom, a storyteller, a writer, and a professor.

- I have to say Liz I love that Nimisha has considered the stage a sacred space.

I remember when she approached our stage for the first time she put her hand on the stage and then put her hand on her heart, very special.

- I was raised Hindu and I do consider it just a space where something more than yourself is being exchanged with the audience.

(gentle music) - Here's her first tale, of unlikely love.

LADVA: So it is the end of the first day of new professor orientation, which I am attending because of my new job.

And I'm leaving the building, and it's pouring rain, which is a problem, because I'm a transplant from California and I'm unprepared.

I have no jacket, no umbrella, flimsy open-toe shoes, and the only way I have to get home is by bus.

But then that's when I see him.

The man who sat across from me at new professor orientation.

He's got salt-and-pepper hair.

He's wearing a tweed jacket with real elbow patches.

(laughter) And he has these gold-rimmed glasses that are ugly, but not in that cool way.

(laughter) And he's walking towards me, and I think he's going to talk to me.

And he does.

"Hi, I'm David, "and I couldn't help but overhear "you were going to take the bus today.

"You know, I've got my sedan "right here on campus, and I'd be happy to give you a ride home."

And I say no thank you.

Because isn't sedan a red flag?

(laughter) And, also, my good Indian immigrant girl upbringing has kicked in, because the truth is, I know I'm not supposed to be really interacting with men until my parents find a suitable boy for me to marry.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, I'm supposed to be having a sort of slightly arranged marriage.

This means that in California, my parents are handing out my biodata sheet.

(laughter) It has my name, my height, my weight, how dark my skin is, my education level, and a photograph.

But in Philadelphia, it's still raining.

So I say, "Actually...

I'd love a ride."

So I get a ride home.

A few weeks after that, I see him with some other faculty members, then we go out with friends of his from out of town, and then he asks me out.

And before I know it, we're dating.

And I like it.

(laughter) And I realize that I should probably tell my parents.

I mean, he's amazing in ways that really surprise me.

For example, you know, he's very self-aware and willing to call himself out.

So two months into dating, he tells me that he's been lying to me.

And it turns out that...

He knows that I have been a lifelong vegetarian.

But he has kept from me the fact that he has been vegetarian for 14 years already.

You see, he wanted me to like him for him and not the convenience of his diet.

(laughter) Now, it's a small lie, it's a withholding lie, but it is manipulative, and he owns it.

And I realize that he has emotional maturity, and I like it.

But I start to get nervous, because I am going to have to tell my parents, and... Two years later, I do.

(laughter) And perhaps you can imagine their reaction, but just in case you can't... My father actually handled it pretty well.

There is just this one day, I'm back in California.

I'm driving.

We are on a mountain road at night, and he grabs the wheel.

"Oh, my God, Daddy, what are you doing?"

"Just leave me on the road to die."

(laughter) And then there's my mother's reaction, which comes every day, three times a day, on my voicemail.

Like a pill.

"Hi, it's Nimisha, leave a message.

Thanks, bye."

(imitates beep) (imitates sobbing) (imitates beep) (laughter) No words.

And so, one day, David hears one of these messages, and he says, "You know, Nimisha, your mother is choosing to react this way."

And I lose it.

"What kind of stupid thing is that to say?

"Are you crazy?

"I am killing my mother with this, with us.

You don't get it!"

And I realize he doesn't get it.

Maybe he doesn't get me, he doesn't get my Indian-ness, I don't get his whiteness.

We're not going to be able to bridge this divide.

It's driving me crazy, I am in turmoil.

I'm not sleeping, my hair is falling out.

And in all of this mess, do you know what David does?

He asks me to marry him.

(audience murmuring and laughing) I say no.

I give him back the ring.

I quit my job.

I move back to California.

It's awkward.

We talk from time to time, but it's weird.

Um, he calls me one day, and he says he's going to be in California, and would I like to go see a film?

Whatever, I say yes.

So, we get to the movie theater, and it's packed.

It's just really crowded.

So David says, "Why don't you wait at this bench while I go to get tickets?"

And David walks away.

But I don't sit at the bench.

I get up and I walk away.

I walk away because I'm still thinking of my mother's voicemail messages.

I walk away because I'm thinking about how I'm not living up to being a good Indian daughter, and I find myself in a balcony looking down at the theater crowd below, and I can see David walking back with the tickets.

He looks like walking sunshine.

And he gets to the bench and he can see I'm not there.

I don't go back, I just watch him.

So he's taking little circles around the bench, and I guess he doesn't want to move too far away in case I come back.

He starts taking bigger circles and all that sunshine from his face, it's gone.

He just keeps looking and looking and pacing and pacing, and the movie starts.

David doesn't leave.

He just keeps looking and looking and pacing and pacing.

And I get it.

In all that crowded movie theater, the only person he's singularly and absolutely looking for is just me, and I want to walk back.

And I want to tell him that I have made some judgments about him and his appearance, about the things he could change... (in low voice): Like the jacket and those glasses.

(normally): And the things he can't change, like the color of his skin.

And I realize he makes the hard conversations easy.

So I do walk back.

I walk back to David.

And shortly after that, we do visit my parents, and we ask for their blessing.

And, to their incredible credit, they give it.

My father asked David if he would like to have a rabbi at the wedding.

David says no, it's okay, he's happy with a Hindu wedding.

He's just glad everyone is at yes.

So we have a lovely Hindu wedding.

We've been married for more than ten years.

We have three kids and one big fat mortgage.

Thank you very much.

(applause) - Nimisha Ladva is paying her mortgage writing fiction and teaching at Haverford college outside Philadelphia.

You know Patricia, I wonder if her parents were like my Chinese parents.

They gave me a hard time because they feared for my future with a non-Chinese husband who they thought would never understand me, who I am my culture, you know, my future before I got engaged my dad made my now husband write an essay about what it means to be in an interracial marriage.

Raising interracial kids in an unkind world.

- Wow Liz what a test perhaps all the roadblocks Nimisha parents put in their way prepared them to face the difficulties together with open eyes and full hearts.

- When Stories from the Stage continues I picked the next story of flying around the world to meet your match online.

Patricia, would you do it?

(laughing) - Would you?

- You're not gonna get me in trouble with my husband.

(laughing) (gentle music) SIMMERMON: My name's Jeff Simmermon.

I live in Brooklyn, New York.

(melodic piano music) I used to be a PR executive for a large cable and broadband internet company.

and I was the guy who saw all of the complaints, so everyone in the whole country that hated their cable company tweeted at me.

- That's just one of the many jobs Jeff had.

He also played drums in a band until it broke up.

That's when he began his unlikely love story.

I lived in a house that was just exactly the color of a bunch of dirty Band-Aids, and my van... Actually, I held the taillights into my van with a series of bumper stickers.

And that's fine if you have a cool rock band.

But if your rock band breaks up, then I'm just a dude with a busted house and a crappy van.

And instead of, like, working on a career or going to grad school or learning to code or anything like that, I just spent a lot of time focusing on this new website in 2003 called hotornot.com... (laughter) ...which is a lot like Tinder except for not as deep, and... (laughter) I would just look at the profiles of women that lived in other countries, very far away from wherever I was, and just imagine that I had a cool girlfriend in some whole other country and none of the problems that I lived with, and that everything was going wonderfully.

And I just did that instead of my job for the most part.

And then one day, I connected with this woman from Perth, Western Australia, which is as far as you can get from where I lived in Richmond, Virginia, without first putting on an astronaut suit.

And we, we clicked.

We started emailing and sending each other these flirty emails, and the emails got longer and longer.

Then we started I.M.-ing for hours and hours, and then we talked on the phone, and we'd talk on the phone for hours and hours.

It was incredibly expensive and just thrilling.

And then one day, she pops the bubble and says... (exhales): "What are we doing here exactly?

"All right, we're just talking and talking, "and that's really great, "and you sound like a guy that ticks off all my boxes.

"But I want a boyfriend I can see and touch, right?

"We're just, we're just wasting our time here.

"Let's just go back to our regular life.

I just, I just can't do this anymore."

And I said, "No, no, no, no, you can't."

You don't understand, you guys.

She roped me in with all these cool stories about crocodile attacks in Australia, and I've just never heard anyone cuss so creatively.

And I just was, like, "I've got to know what you're like "in person.

Give me a month, and I'll have a plan."

She said, "Okay."

And in order to show her that I was serious, I sent her a mix CD.

(laughter) And not just a mix CD.

I sent her a mix CD that would make Michelle Obama consider an open marriage, okay?

(laughter) And during that month, I sold my van.

I sold my drums, sold my vinyl-- that hurt.

I quit my job, did not renew my lease, and I bought a one-way ticket to Australia.

It sounds incredibly romantic, but round-trip was prohibitively expensive.

(laughter) So I called her up and said, "Hey, I got a ticket!"

And she said, "But-- you were just supposed to have a plan."

And I said, "Well, I've decided to start overachieving.

You know, this is, this is how I live now."

And she was, like, "Well, well, you're going to just come here?

"Some guy off the internet?

"You're just going to meet me in person?

"I'm gonna flip my whole life upside down?

"I don't know if I'm into it.

I can't, I can't just have this."

And I said, "Look, I understand where you're coming from, "and from your perspective, I see why you're saying that, "but I need you to consider my perspective, okay?

"Because some guy is coming to visit you.

"But I just sold all my stuff, "so I'm either going to meet you in the Sydney airport "or I am going to have to move to the Sydney airport, "because I don't have a house anymore.

"And, look, we got an adventure staring right at us here, "and when you have a great big adventure "right in front of you, "you just got to turn the radio all the way up and step on the gas and see what happens."

(laughing): And she said, she said, "Okay, I'll meet you there."

I'm in the airplane, over the Pacific Ocean, somewhere between California and Australia.

It's the middle of the night.

And the guy next to me just turns to me and asks me, you know, what am I doing, where am I going?

And I told him.

And he just is, like, is, like... (growling): "Yeah."

Just, of course he's holding a beer.

"Yeah!"

(laughs) "All right, cheers, mate."

(imitates beer opening) Pops the beer: "Hope she shows up."

(laughter) I was, like, "What do you mean, 'Hope she shows up'?

"She's going to show up, that's how these things go.

"The people-- the people show.

What do you mean?"

(stammering): "You really think she's not gonna show up?"

Like, it starts hitting me right then.

And it had not occurred to me until that moment that maybe she could not show up.

And I'm just watching the airplane on the little viewfinder tick into the coast of Australia, and wondering what is going to happen next.

I got through customs and I got to the airport, and there's a huge crowd of people there.

And I don't see her anywhere.

And people that love each other are all hugging each other.

And then there's me.

And then in the back, I just saw this mop of blond hair jumping up and down, and I looked and it was her.

She just couldn't find parking, it was fine.

And... and I ran over to her and she ran over to me and we embraced, and we just looked at each other and we kissed, and we looked at each other some more.

And then...

This is always the part where people, like, lean forward and ask me, like, "Did it work out?

So did it work out?"

And... yeah, I can tell you, unequivocally, in, like, giant neon letters... "Sort of."

(laughter) All right?

You know, we were together for two years, and we're not now, and I'm cool with both of those things.

But, you know, like... Look, life is complicated, and it resists a deep analysis sometimes, okay?

Ultimately, I had to be a dishwasher and a furniture mover and a kangaroo shooter just to sustain this relationship.

I got some horrible sunburns.

I got bit by some terrifying animals.

And...

I don't know, I don't think... To ask what this means is to ask the wrong question, okay?

Nobody gets to live a life without regret, okay?

We all have them.

I just know that my regrets are based on a series of very fascinating decisions.

(applause) - So, okay.

It wasn't a grand finding the love of your life ending, but it was still a love story.

- I know he did not regret a single moment.

And if anything, he was proud that despite the odds he took that leap of faith.

I am very sure Liz, very sure I will not have done it.

Well, at least I will not have sold the house and the car.

Definitely not.

- Very sensible on your part.

You know, it says a lot about his character though, and perhaps feeling that he had nothing to lose.

(upbeat piano music) - It was hard to just pick two stories.

We have so many.

- So many love and almost love stories.

More to come.

Thanks for listening to Stories from the Stage.

I'm Liz Cheng.

- And I am Patricia Alvarado Núñez.

Next time two people stand up for what's right in an episode entitled Courage.

- Listen and watch more of our unique stories at worldchannel.org.

Share them with people you care about.